[xmlroff] FO and Area Tree browser proposal

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Posted here and on the xmlroff Wiki to see which one generates the
most responses.

Regards,


Tony Graham
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XML Technology Center - Dublin
Sun Microsystems Ireland Ltd                       Phone: +353 1 8199708
Hamilton House, East Point Business Park, Dublin 3            x(70)19708

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FO and Area Tree Browser

The xmlroff design calls for an 'Area Tree Adjust' stage after the
initial formatting is done and before the area tree is written out as
PDF, etc.

The intent is to call loadable modules to do the work.

An idea for an initial loadable module that doesn't actually adjust
the area tree is to make a graphical browser that shows the FO and
area trees.

The browser would be:

*proof-of-concept for the loadable module technique
*useful visualisation tool for XSL
*useful debugging aid
*basis for eventual manual area-tree-tweaker

The current idea is a multi-pane or multi-window browser showing:

*FO tree
*Properties of currently selected FO
*Areas generated by currently selected FO
*Area tree with currently selected area highlighted
*Properties of currently selected area

In principle this could be extended to include panes or windows for:

*Formatted output with currently selected area highlighted
*Input XML document(s) with element or attribute that generated
currently selected FO highlighted

(All of which would really fuel the market for multi-head displays.)

GNOME or GTK+ would be the obvious choice for windowing toolkit, but
it could instead be done in Tk or any of a number of other
technologies.